The Urban Birding Challenge, or UBC, is the world’s first organized global birding competition. Superficially, it’s a tournament where cities compete each year to rack up the highest city-wide bird list and be crowned the World’s Birdiest City (Ornithopolis)! It’s a big-year competition between cities. It’s also a blog, and a lot of fun, but at it’s heart, the UBC is much, much more.

Cities are extremely vulnerable to overdevelopment, and we are often hearing about green spaces and other natural areas in Urban environments disappearing, as they give way to luxury condominiums, large industrial developments, and a slew of other construction projects.

The only way to slow this loss of habitat is to show people value in said habitat, and the best way to do that is to get lots of people involved.

The UBC is a great way to motivate people to get out and bird their cities; it shouldn’t just keep people birding in their city when they would otherwise be birding somewhere farther afield, but it motivates people to go birding more in general.

It also has the potential to bring an awareness of the natural world present within cities to lots of non-birders, especially those without much exposure to, or care about, nature. We’re hoping that this will eventually lead lots of people to an appreciation of the ever-present natural world around them in their cities, that they hadn’t previously had their eyes open to.